 5 Poems Author, Renwick Berchild Whistler Grasses bob, the trees press, expand; press, expand as lungs. Loyal speaker, who spake the first murmurings—whistler at the window. What’s that? Faces stack, knotholes of wisps in the darkness, agape and wakeful just as I, truculent foreheads, lined lips, I’ve a wife who died, is she there? Another unholy moaner outside, watchful. Whistler at the window: See the spinning? Hear the hive? Let a demon hush its language to you for a while. Let us in - let us in! I’ve a potion in my eye, an incantation beneath my fingernail. He lies - he lies! Children are burning in the cold - let us in, let us in, let us in in in! Why bake bread when you can steal it? Give us a bed to rest our lives. Snake winding round the globe, grey cloud a turret on the night’s mount gliding across the mirror black, little woman set, six arms weaving at the loom with superb finesse—but the hisser? Just a tail slick as glass, sliding in its yowls, rabbit whining all through the twigs; nimbus jugular ripe for tearing, a spilling of rain; whistler sends regards. The Big Black Storm Windstorms have battered my life for days, treble the rain, tintinnabulation on the streets, a highway roaring like a sea of heaves of grimness, mornings glamsy, murdered pink some dawns, strewn with hoods and caps and umbrellas, and the grey swallows up the goldfinches’ wings, the stellar jay sky, it’s hidden somewhere above. These past nights, slicked clean and shined like new black shoes, squeaking through the hammers’ chorus: Ting slap! Shicka-shick bloosh. Pladda-dap-dap-schlup-tinga-pling-pling-pling-plop-plop-plop-schlup-sloosh - the drops go on and on like an ode, dripping into the nooks of depths, filling recesses to overflow, the dimmest days underwater, so I drown in reading, make nest in the papasan, piling thoughts around me in swaying stacks of ruminations and writings; a highrise I build in my living room. (Fog, in his indigo galosh, steps the trees and barking dogs, I hear his squish, in the rattling of windows and ringing, creeping into the swards to slide his gloved fingers, to parade his mirages, bend the lecturing air, and all the timber and leaves metamorph into a menagerie, and beasts come lumbering, near upon my small lights but never arrived, so I hold my blankets as armor, carefully cook pasta and sip wine, while the massless animals fling as shadows, those nebulous faces sloping in the waterfalls.) All hail—the Big Black Storm—yowls of gale and rivers runneth over curbs; all hail the unrelenting pour of a crying cumulonimbus beyond consoling. The tatter and patter, the gasps and inhales, the sudden capsize of the noise plunged into a moment’s quiet; so I take a chance to breathe, my ears stinging in the hum, chattering in the soundwaves like teeth in cold, I take the glum barrenness that has stripped the world, give up my flames-- they are doused, as are my feet, so I must adhere to the prattling rain, sit in attention to the emptiness accompanied, and acquaint myself with the bite and swallowing of time robbed of me—the clouds rake tears over my glass panes, spread their bodies over stoops, lounging cats purring—I accept the darkened days; nature’s melancholy moodiness is touching the ground with fires that I know, come spring, will rage, Earth’s silvery mane will be rewound, and look young again. Seven Days With Saint Mary This bed is full though nothing is in it. I know the radiation, the nuclear devastation of dragons who came from nowhere to lay down their heads, bellies empty of fire, serpents from Eden who bent themselves together so to remember; a coiling sheet holds sentience, and the window’s light glows over. Anorexia lingers next to me, without a blanket. Nothing covers that white bone sketched in hungry fingernail marks, that membrane of veins beholden to clicking. Brow as stretched chitin. Not one. Not one weak hair makes it out. Only the strongest ones survive now. I rest my back upon the Barlaam grave and feel the plunge like getting skinny. The ceiling has no soul, neither the door, the wall nor floor. The window tries, but doesn’t quite make it—no gazes to care. Someone’s squealing in some room somewhere and it pricks, so the volume on the television goes high. Someone knocks me. Padding feet run out so full of giggling. Radios pile all the waves. There is no air here, just the recycling screams of everyone who comes here to die. Depakote dreams pulsate everything. Straps wait in the wings starving for fleshy struggles. No light makes it to the center. There is not a single opening there. Only the chambers of the whale heart leading to the people who mouth the tile so to lick the feet sweat. Odd things remind us of the world outside. Like taste. We’ve wont to touch anything with our lips when the orderlies aren’t looking. We’ll smear pen ink on our tongues, crunch pencil lead into our molars. Suck our palms while we rock so to remind ourselves what the sea was like. All the bulbs make us salivate, spraying with some god who could save us. I miss the flowers. The cold. The sound of wind. All that is here is the tinking of the heat, the stifling blasts like a goat’s ragged breath. My enjoyments, the coloring books that haven’t been used up, the bibles that still have bindings. When I dream I only dream of all the myriad of ways to escape rape, of any kind. My memory is leaving. It’s fleeing so to make room for all the chemicals and primitive jerks that keep me always vigilant, sleeping with one eye open. The bed is my serenity, for it is the one thing that is mine. No one dictates when I go to it, leave it, what things I choose to fill it with. Saint Mary whirrs in a yammer bell saying that it is all over. Carefully and learnt I say, “All is fine.” I (Still) Love My Crazy Daddy Daddy always paced the living room in the cresting digits. One splintered night, he stole me from my bed. He placed me on the carpet, and conversed with me until he had explained the wispy line that bound three generations of shared blood. Slapped my face when I drifted. Dragged a circle across the fibers. His gangly form, his weasel head, his mouth a pit of piano wires. “You got the bad parts, you got the bad parts!” Family is a cancer, that grows until the corporeal form rips its own head off and spills the beans in shatter. My tummy he pokes with a pencil. “You’re full of beans, you’re full of beans!” There are cameras--everywhere—in the lampposts, in the trunks of trees. The family hamster is a mechanical spy come to take our dreams. “I’m just kidding, I’m just kidding!” I was a robot. He opened my mouth. His arm was an elephant nose that went down and tickled my stomach lining and he said he felt a spider down there. “This is our secret, this is our secret!” My gums are made of pennies, my shoulders blown open from bombs. Trembling, or is it breathing? Life a frosted lemon cake full of teeth with crowns. “The sugar has anthrax, the sugar’s got anthrax, don’t eat it!” Everything’s too sweet, everything’s too sour, and there’s daddy with his enormous yardstick, jogging through the hours. “Your mother’s hiding vibrators all over the house, your mother’s hiding vibrators all over the house!” I lock the door. The carpeted floor full of government microphones beats like a drum. I see father in his bathrobe on his hands and knees, squishing shoes on my sleepy feet, with his greying eyeballs shooting out lasers and his lungs heaving light beams. “We have to leave, we have to leave!” The sun is a hale fish beneath the water, the dog jolts me with a wild cry. I’m back again. I want to die. I want to roll my wail into a candlestick and have my daddy come light it for me. “I have to go away for awhile... just awhile, just a little while.” High pitched noise. Dried blood cocoa brown. My mother runs herself ragged through the town. Where is daddy—where is he now? The Toyota Ford slams against the wall and his colorless body washes up on its side. Mooring this, mooring all of this, those synaptic corpses gone glinting with each swell that licks them. Father never slept, but he’s sleeping now. Did you know I’m crying now? I miss my crazy daddy. Night Terrors With Bob Marley Phantoms, slow yourselves. Oneiric couplings unhand my umbrella, pluviophiles, wet your lips on another’s thin neck, my city is full of swans honking through their nights. Terrors they call them, they in the white mantles, stethoscope garlands, the smell of isopropyl beneath their fingernails I caught the ghosts beneath mine, digging in the sheets, my back a long canoe on fire. Lodged in the rondo of wheeling voids, I bought a condo in the Chthonian scape as a youngling of wandering legs my mother father chased me to the rims of grimy oilbanks where I’d mutter my loves, eyes so round, tongue searching for a step to place toe on. (Record sp-sp-sputters) Things cry. Even now I house the leviathans cramped and camped out on the couch, nodding their heads in the piquant moombahton, my sensorium engorged fat off the dragons, in the reggae oscillations churning sharp visions releasing the weeds. The blowtorch shower, the nurtured sweat beads, the daisy chain, my portrait in earth-tones, mise en abyme, on Valhallveien my head roams, each sleep I shed a thousand hellion years, yelps paused in time. Can anyone ever really know the city that raked me, smothered me at the bottom of a staircase but a mind is a moving target; spirits swerve, images whistle, lies dance in the forever mumba of woeful maracas.  Bio:
Renwick Berchild is half literary critic, half poet. She writes at Nothing in Particular Book Review, and her poems have appeared in Headline Press, Whimperbang, Free Verse Revolution, Spillwords, Vita Brevis, The Stray Branch, The Machinery India, Lunaris Review, Streetcake Mag, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. She was born and raised on the angry shores of Lake Superior, and now lives in a micro-apartment in Seattle, WA. Find more of her work at www.renwickberchild.com
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Categories
All
|
RSS Feed
